The CEO Who Sees Around Corners

304 Pages·2013·5.68 MB·English

The CEO Who Sees Around Corners

The

CEO

Who
Sees
Around Corners
How to Make the
Right Reality-Based
Strategic Decisions in
a Fast-Moving World
Jay ABRAHAM and Carlos DIAS
Executive Learning Systems, Inc.
THE CEO WHO SEES AROUND CORNERS
How to Make the Right Reality-Based
Strategic Decisions in a Fast-Moving World

Copyright © 2013 by Jay Abraham and Carlos Dias

Published by Executive Learning Systems, Publishing Division
First edition, September 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
retrieval systems, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.

For information and inquiries, address Executive Learning Systems, Inc.,
8530 SW 166th Street, Palmetto Bay, FL 33157; email: [email protected].

Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book
are available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-9895976-2-3

This book is available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by
corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please
contact Executive Learning Systems, Inc. at the address above.
About the Authors
Jay Abraham

As founder and CEO of Abraham
Group, Inc., in Los Angeles, Califor-
nia, Jay Abraham has spent the last
forty years solving problems and
significantly increasing the bottom
lines for over 10,000 entrepreneurs,
corporate business families, and
multinational companies in more
than 400 industries worldwide. He is also Chairman and partner of
Executive Learning Systems, Inc., having actively collaborated with
Carlos in the development of Creative Leadership for Turbulent
Times.
Jay has more than $9 billion of wealth creation documented for
his business clients, with over 12,000 stories on record, and some-
thing like 3,000 prominent authors and experts who quote him in
their published work. The Strategy of Preeminence is a philosophy
for operating a highly profitable and sustainable growth organization.
This strategy is becoming the underpinning of a corporate culture;
hiring, marketing, and client interaction – everything should flow
from this powerful belief system and new world business view.
Jay has been acknowledged as a unique and distinctive authority in
the field of business performance enhancement – and the maximizing
and multiplying of business assets. He’s been featured twice in Investor’s
Business Daily both on the front page and in the Leaders & Success
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Section – saying Jay “[k]nows how to maximize results with minimum
effort.” Forbes Magazine listed Jay as one of the top five executive
coaches in the country, saying jay’s specialty is “[t]urning corporate
under performers into marketing and sales whizzes.”
In addition, Jay has won high praise as a world marketing genius
in numerous publications such as Forbes Magazine, The New York
Times, Inc. Magazine, and many others, and as a keynote speaker in
the United States and all around the world, including in China,
Japan, Russia, and Singapore, countries where he is considered the
Marketing Genius $9.4 Billion Man.

Learn more about Jay Abraham at:
www.abraham.com
www.CreativeLeadershipForTurbulentTimes.com.
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Carlos Dias

With forty-plus years of leading,
mentoring, and consulting with
corporate business families and
multinational companies, Carlos is
a successful, pragmatic, down-to-
earth former CEO of American
and European multinational and
corporate family businesses.
Carlos has fine-tuned the Strategic Wealth Creator System™ –
six system thinking processes that he created and developed over the
last twenty years – to adjust to the changes in this new non-linear
dynamic world.
The culmination of his career is the interactive eLearning program
for CEOs and senior executives, Creative Leadership for Turbulent
Times, in which the business ecosystem is described step-by-step, with
Jay Abraham in active collaboration.
Carlos is CEO of Executive Learning Systems, devoted to the
research and development of new tools and processes for CEOs and
senior executives, in particular, to increase their strategic effectiveness,
make their corporate family businesses resilient, enable them to
continuously adjust to the changes in this new fast-moving world, and
to gain competitive advantage and sustainable, profitable growth.

Learn more about Carlos Dias at:
www.carlosdias.com
www.CreativeLeadershipForTurbulentTimes.com.
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This book is dedicated to all the mentors we have had throughout
our careers – those who have taken the time and effort to challenge
us to operate at our own maximum degree of greatness.
It’s also our collaborative attempt to help nourish, grow,
and fortify the performance of the corporate family-owned-business,
which is – and will always be – the foundation of our
economy here, and representative of the future foundation of
dynamic economies in countless emerging countries today
and for decades to come.
Turbulent change is the only constant we can now be certain will
always be with us – no matter the industry or locale. Strategic,
proactive, critical integrative response is the only certainty
that can assure sustained success.

&
Jay Abraham Carlos Dias

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For Those Wanting A
Quick Glance Before Reading…
We wrote this book to introduce you to proven and unique powerful
theories, new beliefs and mental models, and new concepts and
processes to succeed in the twenty-first century. It is, in particular, for
those corporate family business CEOs and senior executives buffeted
by tumultuous events – in their market, in their country, in their own
companies. It is for those CEOs and senior executives who aren’t sure
just how to take their organizations onto a new path of success in a fast-
moving turbulent world. It’s for you that this book has been written!
For your family business, or any organization, to be triumphant
tomorrow, you, as CEO, need to learn to craft distinctive business
models and singular competitive strategies that will be unique in
tomorrow’s market, which will be quite different from today’s. To do
so, you first need to understand and learn unique underlying princi-
ples and mental models – in other words, the rationality or way of
thinking of today. Why? In a fast-moving world, business models and
strategies are built around important key assumptions about the
external environment relevant today but that is rapidly irrelevant
tomorrow. You can’t depend anymore on experts alone to tell you
what to do. The knowledge of experts is at risk of being outdated if
they don’t update their knowledge. We are living in an extraordinarily
difficult world with no single competitor, and many dangers.
So this book isn’t just about classical management concepts and
techniques. It’s introducing a new practical, proven way of thinking to
reach greatness, this valuable quality of being effective, admired, and
respected for business excellence in difficult and turbulent times.
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Consequently, this is not a book that offers quick solutions or
clever tips that will help you instantly become a successful CEO.
This is not possible; true success takes work, time, and commitment.
It takes learning and patience to become a “CEO who sees around
corners.” This book will not teach you what to think, either. Its aim,
instead, is to give you a framework for you to accelerate in learning
how to think, to place you on a fast track to leadership, by sharing
powerful research and practical concepts and processes that deal
with success and failure in the twenty-first century. You will learn
to identify where you are going and how to reach your destination
using the same proven map used by our clients and by us each day.
This book will encourage you to consider the key questions that
you need to know to become a “CEO who sees around corners.” It
will provide you with the foundation from which you can propel your
company into high, sustained profitability in today’s fast-moving,
unpredictable times.
This book is about the science of winning and losing for CEOs
in the twenty-first century. Everything written herein is clearly
expressed and summarized to help you understand the highly
critical decisions you’ll need to make to bring success, joy, and
peace of mind in your life, instead of mediocrity, despair, and stress.
Therefore, in the course of putting this material together, we have
been very careful to heed Russell Ackoff’s view of the difference
between teaching and learning, the former, according to Ackoff, a
major obstruction to the latter. “The educational system,” he has said,
“is not dedicated to produce learning by students, but teaching by
teachers.”1 Being taught something turns out to be a rather ineffective
way of learning. Some of what is taught might be retained, but
typically retention is for a brief time only. On the other hand, some-
thing is learned when it can be used practically and effectively to
attain a desired end. Effective education is training by doing. In this

1 Russell Ackoff: A Lifetime of Systems Thinking, Pegasus Communications, Inc.
Drawn from a speech at a Villanova University conference celebrating Ackoff’s 80th
birthday.
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